this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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GenZedong
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This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the "cloud". Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.
The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.
For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their "content", doesn't mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.
All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it's easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, the cloud has value - the value of the information stored in it.
"Cloud" is servers, energy required to run them, building housing them, etc.
Information in it can be freely copied and has no real exchange value (it does has use value but that's not something Marxism deals with).
Edit: to clarify, for Marx workers directly involved in creating commodities capitalists sell create value, while workers involved in circulation, marketing, sales, logistics, transport, security, etc consume value created elsewhere, this is the difference between productive and unproductive labour for Marx. Unproductive labour is necessary to realise the value created by productive labout, but it does not generate new surplus value.
Transportation is not, by Marx's definition, work that belongs to circulation of commodities. And I would also say that logistics also falls into the same sphere as well. Both would constitute a part of the production process itself. As would, on social averages, the marketing departments that produce branding and the aesthetics of a commodity.
The clearest examples of unproductive workers are those paid from capital: workers involved in realising surplus value, I.e. sales teams, shop clerks. And workers paid from revenues: directly hired servants (More likely in Marx's time), and workers hired by the state for local and state administration, and others like them whose labour is paid out of taxes (i.e. surplus value collected by the state), but some of these are part of the 'faux frais' of production itself - like health and education workers, and can constitute productive labour as such.
A good article breaking down the topic from across vol 1, 2 and 3 of capital plus the theories of surplus value:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/howell/produnprod.htm
Also, and it's touched on in the article, the incessant need to split this or that labour into productive and unproductive feels almost entirely unnecessary in regards to the organisation of the proletariat toward revolutionary ends. That any given member of the working class is employed in productive or unproductive labour doesn't change the potential precarity of their position as a waged labourer subject to the whims of capital and its state.
Thank you for correction about transportation! By marketing I really meant ads, I had no idea marketing departments also design aesthetics of commodities.
"Unproductive" is not a judgement, it doesn't mean a worker is less revolutionary or lives under better conditions. It's only needed to understand where the value is created and where it is consumed. It's important to understand global value chains, value transfer from the Global South to the Global North.